Spy Testifies to Frequent Sexual Trysts, Says FBI Agent Hunt Paid for Abortion

A convicted Soviet spy, who allegedly sexually enticed FBI Agent Richard W. Miller into a plot to betray his country in 1984, told a jury Wednesday that another FBI agent had paid for an abortion for her in 1983 after an earlier sexual affair.

The testimony by Svetlana Ogorodnikova in a crowded Los Angeles federal courtroom continued to shift the focus of Miller’s retrial for espionage to her alleged romance with FBI counterintelligence Agent John Hunt and away from her later involvement with Miller.

In the most lurid testimony of 18 months of court proceedings in the Miller spy case, Ogorodnikova described “frequent” sexual encounters with Hunt in 1982 at her West Hollywood apartment and other locations, while her husband, Nikolai, was at work as a meatpacker.

As Ogorodnikova began her second day on the witness stand, she quickly volunteered that she had been in “love” with Hunt.

Visits to Her Home

And one of Miller’s defense lawyers, Joel Levine, asked if Hunt had ever visited her at her home.

“All the time,” she replied. “In the daytime, when my husband was working. Sometimes he would have breakfast, sometimes we would have lunch and we would have sex.”

The 54-year-old Hunt, who has testified that he rejected sexual advances from Ogorodnikova, retired from the FBI’s Los Angeles office about two months after the arrest of Miller and the Ogorodnikovs on Oct. 2, 1984. He now lives with his wife in Seattle.

His version of his relationship with Ogorodnikova is that it centered on efforts to recruit her as an FBI informant but that he closed his file on her in late 1982 after deciding that her loyalties could not be determined.

Despite that, Hunt has testified on three occasions that he visited a Hollywood doctor with Ogorodnikova in 1983. He claims that the visit was prompted by a call from Ogorodnikova, who allegedly said that she was suffering from a rare and probably fatal blood disease.

But Ogorodnikova, sentenced to 18 years in prison after pleading guilty to espionage conspiracy in her own trial last June, gave a dramatically different account Wednesday as she detailed her story for the first time.

“Why did you go with Mr. Hunt to the doctor’s office?” Levine asked.

“I was pregnant,” she said.

“Why (did you go) with Mr. Hunt as opposed to going alone?”

“He was my man,” Ogorodnikova replied.

“Did you have some kind of treatment?”

“No, I had an abortion,” she answered.

“Did you ever tell Mr. Hunt you were suffering from some kind of rare blood disease?”

“Blood? What? I told him that I was pregnant,” she replied.

“When you went to the doctor for the abortion, how did you pay for it?”

“Mr. Hunt paid,” she said.

According to Ogorodnikova, who contradicted virtually all of Hunt’s previous testimony as a witness for the prosecution, Hunt at one point had convinced her that he planned to divorce his wife and marry Ogorodnikova.

“I love this man,” she said.

“Did you ever talk about getting married?” Levine asked.

“Yes,” she said. “He decided to quit his job and get married.”

Ogorodnikova confirmed Hunt’s testimony on one point--that Hunt told her in late 1982 that she would “no longer be needed” by the FBI. She said the alleged relationship had cooled by that time because both she and Hunt had problems.

“He said his wife was feeling that he had another woman, that every time he came home his shirts were impregnated with my perfume and my lipstick,” she said.

“My husband also felt that I had somebody else,” Ogorodnikova continued. “I was coming home at 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning. I was lying to my husband, and Hunt taught me how to do it. I could hardly look into the eyes of my husband and my son.”

Sidewalk Meeting

Ogorodnikova’s testimony specifically disputed one account by Hunt of a meeting June 6, 1982. In his version, she unexpectedly threw her arms around him on a Hollywood sidewalk, announced that she loved him, and suggested that they “go somewhere.”

She said that Hunt had pestered her on that day to meet with him, even though she was planning to attend a graduation party from a “cardiology college,” where she had learned to be a cardiac technician.

Although she first rejected the idea of meeting with Hunt, Ogorodnikova said that she reluctantly gave in to his urgings and ended up sitting in his car “kissing” him.

While Ogorodnikova’s testimony focused heavily on her personal relationship with Hunt, including his allegedly profuse apologies after an apparent accidental visit to a “homosexual bathhouse” in 1982, the convicted Soviet agent de-emphasized her relations with Soviet officials.

Levine began his questioning by asking how she obtained a forged passport claiming Czechoslovakian citizenship, which enabled her to make return trips to the Soviet Union. Ogorodnikova said she did it with the help of a Soviet emigre friend who runs a travel agency in Beverly Hills.

Visit to Consulate

Ogorodnikova said she visited the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco in September, 1982, after consultations with Hunt, and told Soviet officials there that he was her boyfriend and that they were planning to get married.

Continuing to minimize the role of Soviet officials in a possible plot to seek to recruit Hunt, she said the initial response of Vice Consul Boris Beliakov was to jokingly suggest that she find another boyfriend with a “simpler” job so that she would have less trouble traveling with her son, Matvei, to Russia.